On Thursday, Politico became the latest outlet to fall for the GOP’s fake movement on climate change. Apparently, Politico reports, “behind closed doors,” there are lots of Republicans who are “candid in acknowledging that action is needed.” The story even quoted Dan Byers, Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute, who said he would “go out on a limb and maybe predict that you could see a nice package of climate energy innovation-focused legislation be signed by the president later this year.”
Then, the very next day, Politico reported that said Global Energy Institute hired a new head: Marty Durbin, formerly of the American Petroleum Institute, America's Natural Gas Alliance, and the American Chemistry Council.
So if you’re a reporter wondering if the Chamber is honest in its change of heart, and believe that it’s really going to work on “a nice package of climate energy innovation-focused legislation,” stop for a moment and ask yourself what the odds are that a former Big Oil executive is going to support public policy to eliminate Big Oil.
In the meantime, we can rest assured that deniers will never, ever admit they were in any way wrong.
And one’s even said as much. In a new post on CliScep, Geoff Chambers started laying the groundwork for deniers to look at the systematic failure of the climate system, and still claim to have been right all along.
Even if temperatures spike, the ice all melts, and Florida and Manhattan are under water, deniers would supposedly still have been right about the hockey stick being fake, Chambers claims.
It seems that Chambers believes that admitting deniers are wrong would mean admitting that “scientists were right to falsify graphs; to create hockey sticks out of thin air.” Because deniers have claimed alarmist science is wrong, Chambers seems to be saying, even if the climate does change more or less exactly as “alarmists” have warned, that science would still be wrong.
He concludes by writing that deniers “can be 100% wrong about our predictions of future temperatures and their effects, and still 100% right about the nature of science, of truth, of reality.”
Which really lays bare the bad-faith nature of denial. They’re not actually talking about science, or climate models, or temperatures--instead they’re more interested in “the nature of science, of truth, of reality.”
And while Chambers doesn’t say it, what deniers are really arguing is that science, truth, and reality are whatever they want it to be.
And in the reality they’ve created, the GOP is totally on the cusp of getting on board with climate action, and all the of coverage praising their softening tone is totally smart, and not at all the journalistic equivalent of Charlie Brown thinking that surely, this time Lucy won’t pull the football away.
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